Supercharge your search with

Typesense

Elliot Sawyer, Senior Silverstripe Developer at Catalyst.Net

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                   Open Source Alternative  
                         to Solr        
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Actual ad: https://twitter.com/typesense/status/1702152406924980670

TL;DR 🤯

Typesense is a search engine for your website that does clever things much faster than anything else you've seen

What we'll talk about

• A little bit about the Typesense project
• Awesome things others have done with it
• Awesome things I have done with it
• How do you get started?

DEMO: Autosuggest

How does it work?

• Search as you type
• Performance. Cost. Ease-of use

About Typesense

• 6 years old
• C++
• GPLv3

About Typesense

• Free to use.
• SaaS hosting available
• "CDN for extremely fast search"

What you can do 🦸

• Search millions of records instantly
• Search as you type
• Multi-threaded + RAM = < ms responses

Benchmarks

typesense.org/docs/overview/benchmarks

Features 💥

• Curated search results
• Synonyms
• Analytics
• Decentralised dashboard

Curated search results 🔝

• Make Silverstripe appear ahead of CMS

Curated search results 🔝

• Exclude Wordpress from CMS

Synonyms 🔄

• "Silverstripe", "Drupal", and "content management system" <=> "CMS".

Built-in analytics 🧐

• Popular queries
• "No-hit" queries
• Track how often a particular result is clicked on

😐

Is that it?

Scoped search 🛡️

• Role-based access
• 1 user, 1 key, 1 collection
• 1 group, 1 key, 1 collection

Geospatial searches 🌐

• Radius, or within a polygon
• GIS applications, such as council plans, Homes.co.nz, etc

AI and machine-learning 🤖

• Adds context to results.
• Index-time calculations.
• LLM reads and summarises.

AI and machine-learning 🤖

• Image search.
• Audio / video transcriptions.
• Huge win for accessibility
• Perfect for Catalyst Cloud A100

catalystcloud.nz/about/news/catalyst-cloud-releases-nvidia-gpu-as-a-service

Key takeaways

• Easy to deploy
• Save on development time
• Performance and user experience
• Cost savings

DEMO: Instant Search

DEMO: Instant Search

And just for you ... a demo!

• Resene colour search from a spreadsheet
• Replaced NZ Post Address Finder using LINZ data
• Audiobook transcript search

sawyer.nz/demos

AWESOME

How do you get started?

Batteries included! 🔋

Getting started 🚀

Very simple JSON based schema:

                        ```js
                        let schema = {
                            'name': 'companies',
                            'fields': [
                              {
                                'name': 'company_name',
                                'type': 'string',
                                'facet': false
                              },
                              {
                                'name': 'num_employees',
                                'type': 'int32',
                                'facet': false
                              },
                              {
                                'name': 'country',
                                'type': 'string',
                                'facet': true
                              }
                            ],
                            'default_sorting_field': 'num_employees'
                          }
                          ```
                    

Automatic schema detection ✨

...or just let Typesense do it for you.

```js
{
    "name": "companies",  
    "fields": [
      {"name": ".*", "type": "auto" }
    ]
}
```  
                    

Field names are regex-based, and so are facets; can provide as much or little detail as you want

Automatic schema detection ✨

Disorganised or poorly structured data set

Typesense will still create a working collection for you.

More info about Typesense

• typesense.org/
• cloud.typesense.org/
• github.com/typesense/typesense
• github.com/algolia/instantsearch
• github.com/typesense/typesense-instantsearch-adapter

Questions?

Thanks! (╯°□°)╯

• Slack: @null
• github.com/elliot-sawyer
• linkedin.com/in/elliot-sawyer/
• sawyer.nz/contact